I've posted lots on population control, or rather, voluntary reduction of population. The benefits to future generations would be enormous, and far from costing anything, there would be an immediate financial benefit to everyone except the spivs who depend on scarcity of resources to make their living.

We can cure a broken leg, but that doesn't guarantee you won't break the other one. It's preferable to prevent broken legs by not skiing. So we are pretty good, and getting better, at identifying and avoiding external carcinogens, and I would be perfectly happy if the NHS did not treat smokers for lung cancer or circulatory disorders at my expense.

Now consider what would happen if we could prevent or cure every spontaneous cancer.

Quote

at the broad disease group level, cancer was the most common cause of death in 2015 (27.9% of all deaths registered). This was followed by circulatory diseases, such as heart diseases and strokes (26.2%). (ONS)

Now these are primarily diseases of old age, so if we could cure them all, what would we be allowed to die from? Alzheimer's and dementia accounted for just over 11% of all deaths in 2015. Would that be preferable? I've watched relatives die from "all of the above" and quite frankly if I had a choice I'd go for cancer with best palliative care and pain relief, because the symptoms are the least degrading. And assisted suicide, please.

Taken to the extreme, if we cured all disease we would have created immortal cell lines: as each part wears out it is replaced by an identical one. Immortality has its uses in laboratories but is also a considerable nuisance as such cells can colonise and contaminate other cultures, so my immortal sneeze could become your fatal cancer.

I'm not dispassionate or cynical about this. Part of my work has been and still is in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer, but I think we are approaching the point at which we have to make some serious choices about what and whom to treat, and ensure that everyone is entitled, not to everlasting life, but to a dignified exit at the time and by the means of his choosing.

All medical interventions have risk, and it is the duty of those offering such interventions to ensure that the patient is competent to understand the risk and sufficiently briefed to be able to give informed consent.

My colleagues and I, and hundreds more expert and lay referees on ethical committees around the world, spend many hours each week reviewing the statutory information leaflets that accompany new medications, surgical procedures and medical devices, at "first in human", "clinical trial" and "general release" levels to ensure that the attendant risks are clearly explained and the potential benefits are not oversold.

By the time an intervention reaches general release, the risk statistics are very sound and a wide range of contraindications and sideffects will have been noted, but (a) statistics cannot predict an individual response and (b) we have no matching statistic for benefit. When signing a consent form you are taking a gamble where you know the objective odds of losing, but have only a subjective view of what constitutes a win.

And that is just for competent, literate adults. Fortunately I have a shortcut for dealing with research on unconscious or otherwise non-competent patients: I ask the researcher "would you do it to your wife?".

Although Christ was addressed as rabbi by his supporters I do not believe he had any formal religious education and was simply a lay preacher inspired by John the Baptist

One aspect of Judaism that irritates dictators is the inherent resilience of a community where authority and key rituals are distributed to family level: the synagogue is more a place of study than worship, literacy is the norm, and argument and dissent are admired rather than suppressed. "Rabbi" means teacher more than anything, and ordination is considered "usual" rather than essential, so formal training is less important than local recognition of wisdom and judgement.

The resultant factionalism was nicely mocked in The Life of Brian, but after 6000 years of persecution, a regular toast is "we're still here".

A special memory from my schooldays. The Reverend J Leo Kay taught us maths, cricket and scripture. One morning I asked him why, there being on record at least seventeen crucified saviour gods born of virgins, he only taught us about one. He said "I'm only paid to teach you about one". There may be other honest priests about, but I've not met many who could match that.

Did Jesus die on the cross? It's a fairly efficient way of torturing people to death in a few hours at most, though it's mostly done nowadays by stress hanging - less carpentry involved than in a public spectacle.

The whole story is a bit weird. Whilst nailing a carpenter to a cross has a certain irony, crucifixion was a Roman tradition, not a Jewish one, and occupying powers don't generally leave the execution of a revolutionary folk hero to the natives, nor encourage their soldiers to attend executions ordered by the locals.

Another neat bit of irony by the Roman authorities: Offered the choice of releasing one prisoner, the crowd apparently yelled "Bar Abbas" - the Son of the Father, and they got some scumbag called Barabbas instead.

The resurrection is obvious bunkum. If you can move a stone from A to B, you can move it from B to A by muscle, not magic. Why would anyone set a guard over a tomb unless there was a strong likelihood that someone would break in and steal a body? Even if the body evaporated by magic, how come the guard never saw the stone move from B to A? And if it was magic, why move the stone at all?

The real mystery of human stupidity is how the death of one rabbi became a pretext for the murder of untold hundreds more, and their congregations, long after the Roman empire collapsed..

Don't remove the nitrogen! Pure oxygen at atmospheric pressure will revive a patient quickly but it is toxic after a few minutes' regular breathing. You can either dilute it 1:4 with nitrogen (as in normal air) or supply it at reduced pressure (0.2 atm) as in some spacecraft. Supplemental oxygen is handy for flying up to 20,000 ft in an unpressurised aircraft, gradually increasing the concentration to pure ox at around 30,000 ft and using a positive pressure mask or helmet at 0.2 atm above that height.

You also need a bit of CO2 to stimulate the breathing reflex, and some H2O to stop the airways from drying out, which is why mouth-to-mouth can be very effective and rebreathing is used for longterm anesthesia and high-altitude aviation.

I have seen documentary of couples who volunteer to go into an mri scanner for sex, apparently they have to take a deep breath and stop moving for the scan, unless tech has since improved for motion. I understand some motion artifacts can be removed by image processing, but slow movement is probably best

The early work in this area warranted an IgNobel Prize. You can use echoplanar imaging to freeze motion, but the imafge quality is generally poor. Gated acquisition can be used to capture high quality images of repetitive motion: we have some excellent movies of an athlete's heart valve performance when running on a treadmill in an upright MRI. But AFAIK there is no MRI or x-ray process for measuring testosterone.

I would hope the underlying assertion of this thread is false. The longterm effects of raised testosterone are to remove hair from the scalp and replace it on the chin and chest - not the conventional interpretation of feminine beauty.

I have no problem with either. On a microscopic scale, energy is quantised, but the quanta are so small that for many practical purposes we can use a continuous approximation.

Most apes use classical physics at least as well as most humans, with the possible exception of projectiles: I am always amazed at our ability to pick up any object and throw it into a waste bin without having to contemplate its aerodynamics. My primatologist friends say that chimps are capable of adequate accuracy with training, but just don't have any interest in darts or basketball. Very few humans understand cricket.

I have watched a gorilla conduct a null experiment to investigate gravitation. Unlike Galileo (whose most famous but probably apocryphal experiment he replicated) he was not persecuted by religious parasites.

When I was a lad, the Luftwaffe unloaded a few hundred bombs on London every night, and showered the place with V1 aircraft and V2 rockets by day. Vigilance was useless, death was commonplace, and panic was pretty much unknown. I think the latter was partly due to careful use of language by politicians and journalists, who avoided glorifying such actions as "terrorism" and simply referred to their perpetrators as "Nazi scum".

It is not proven that the cosmolgical redshift observations are velocity related,

I never said they were, though it would be presumptuous to state that there is no velocity component involved, especially when it can be distinguished in nearby objects (from laboratory to galaxy) whose velocities can be measured independently. The only observations I quote are that distant objects generally have larger redshifts than near ones, and the CMB redshift is apparently less than some distant galaxies, which suggests relative motion between them. If this finding can be attributed to Doppler or Hubble effects, I have suggested how it can be consistent with a locally contracting universe.

Quote

therefore it is presumptuous to state as fact that grav.source minus grav.receiver is the total sum of gravitational shift.

It is never presumptuous to state what is either a tautology or an experimental fact.

I'm certainly not going to waste my time repeating why and where you are making presumtions again and again.

Unlike you I have not made a single presumption nor stated as fact anything that has not been experimentally proven - in most cases by experiments that you have quoted but clearly not understood.Your insult has not fallen on deaf ears. Goodbye.

Never mind the physics, or the Nobel that he never got. With six appearances in each of The Simpsons* and The Big Bang Theory**, Hawking deserved an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement as a Nonspeaking Character on the Other Side of the World.

Not sure if he was ever prosecuted for possession of a lethal weapon, but his wheelchair driving in Cambridge market made The Stig look like an amateur.

You need to make up your mind as to whether decreasing a gravitational field increases or decreases redshift. It is difficult to convince you that it does neither whilst you believe it does both. Physics is not religion!

Quote

in a universe that is 'contracting' under the influence of gravity, an observation of light from a distant galaxy cluster will be redshifted, and light arriving from more distant galaxy clusters will be further redshifted, b/c that light was emitted at a point in history that pre-dates the light emitted from the closer galaxy.